Where the Marathon Matters

Japan's long-running tradition

In the past 13 Olympic Games and world championships, 14 different Japanese athletes have garnered a total 17 marathon medals for their country. In a land where heritage and tradition are respected, we look at the support system behind this consistency.

Zay-zay, hah-hah. Zay-zay, hah-hah. Zay-zay, hah-hah. It's the Japanese onomatopoeic sound for deep, laborious breathing, the little sound you might make as you come around the final bend on the last of a dozen hard 400s. It's the slightly desperate wheezing of the lungs as ambition calls you to another level of oxygen debt and discomfort, and your body replies, "I'd just as soon not go there, thank you very much." Zay-zay, hah-hah.

September 2. A hot, humid and altogether unpleasant marathon morning in Osaka for the women on the final day of the 2007 IAAF World Championships, providing the conditions for a classic race of attrition. Thirty optimistic women in the early miles, then 20, and finally only eight as the lead pack passes 20 miles on the way from Osaka Castle to Nagai Stadium. Kenya's Catherine Ndereba has slowly begun turning the screws, and only a quartet remains up front with 2 kilometers remaining.

A few minutes later it is down to the expected match between Ndereba and the possible future queen, Chunxiu Zhou of China. Strides behind that pair, Reiko Tosa of Japan is seeing her own dreams of a second world championships medal slowly slip away. Fighting what seems inevitable, Tosa struggles with the pace. Zay-zay, hah-hah. Ndereba and Zhou are gone, Ndereba about to win the final duel for the gold medal. Tosa's face contorts as Xiaolin Zhu of China also begins slipping away in the battle for bronze. A meter, then two, then a dozen. Zay-zay, hah-hah. Not only are Tosa's medal hopes escaping with Zhu, but also Japan's hopes to avoid the ignominy of being only the third host country to go medal-less at a world championship.

But...but, Tosa refuses. Just as the string is about to be broken, Tosa digs deep, willing herself back into the race. Zay-zay, hah-hah. Meter by painfully gained meter, she draws alongside Zhu. Zay-zay, hah-hah. A collective gasp goes through the stadium as Tosa gains a stride, then two. Her face wrenched in anguish, spittle flying about, her arms thrashing with whatever energy is left. Zay-zay, hah-hah. Form is no longer an issue. There's no set of figure skating judges looking to award points for artistic impression. Just...get...yourself...across...the...line. Zay-zay, hah-hah. Somehow, Tosa does it, breaking Zhu to take the bronze medal.

The next morning on a run around Osaka Castle, Tsuyoshi Ogata, Japan's 2005 marathon bronze medalist and the top Japanese finisher (fifth place) a week earlier in the men's race, could only marvel. "I don't think anybody but a Japanese could have done that run yesterday."

The Finns call it sisu. The Americans call it guts. The Japanese call it konjou. Whatever it is in any language, the Japanese marathoners have it. It's why the men and women have now taken 17 marathon medals in the past 13 world championships and Olympic Games.

And it is why the Japanese public loves distance running.

Fire up this public support with half a century of marathon expertise and a fierce work ethic, then underwrite it with the deepest corporate support system in the world, and you get the perpetual championship success that is Japanese marathoning.

Makenki Spirit and Corporate Support

The very nature of long-distance running resonates with the Japanese spirit. Endurance, perseverance, and the will to never-give-up-no-matter-how-damn-uncomfortable-it-gets are core Japanese values. A popular proverb is Nana-korobi, ya-oki.

(Fall down seven times, get up eight times.) One of the highest compliments that can be paid to an athlete is to say that he or has makenki, roughly translated as "the spirit not to lose."

Year after year, this spirit is harnessed in developing an unending line of marathoners. In the urban settings of Kyoto and Tokyo, along the rice fields of Sakura in Chiba prefecture, in the oceanside town of Nobeoka on the southern island of Kyushu, and in dozens of other towns and cities across the country, the world's most elaborate system of corporate support for distance running continues with a regularity expected of military or agricultural endeavors.

One such site is the city of Okayama, halfway between Osaka and Hiroshima. Each morning, the women of Tenmaya department store's elite team jog 2 kilometers from their company dormitory to their daily meeting spot in Okayama Sports Park. The athletes form a large circle with head coach Yutaka Taketomi and his staff, then go through a series of calisthenics and stretching, a team member calling out the rhythm, "Ichi-ni-san-shi" (One-two-three-four.) The group then draws in around Taketomi-san as he tells them of the day's training and makes note of any upcoming competitions or training camps. A moment later he quietly sends them off for a 50-minute run. The women, most clad in their pink and black team colors, are soon on the outskirts of Okayama, heading along hilly countryside roads and riverside bike paths. There is almost no chitchat during the run, as the pace steadily cranks up from 7 minutes to 6:15.

After the run, each athlete will in turn go up to Taketomi-san or to younger coach Futoshi Shinohara for brief feedback about her training and condition. With a short bow, the women run back to their dorm for a quick shower and breakfast, and then head into the main branch of Tenmaya for half a day's work. In the afternoon, they will gather again for the day's main workout. Several times each year the athletes will get a leave from their work duties to make intensive training camps called gasshuku.

Taketomi-san has done a remarkable job. Although he does not recruit the top high school athletes, he has already coached four women to sub-2:25 efforts, two more than in U.S. history. His athletes have won marathons at Tokyo, Osaka, Berlin, and Vienna, among others. More importantly from the corporate sponsor's view, they have placed women on Japan's world championship and Olympic marathon teams, the pinnacle of Japanese track and field.

Once recruited, the women on the Tenmaya team are given every opportunity to reach their potential. Monthly salaries? Check. Housing? Check. Meals? Check. A fully paid staff of coaches, nutritionists, and physical therapists? Check. The entire tab for gasshuku camps in Japan, Albuquerque, Boulder, or China's Kunming? Check. The athletes' job is simply to run. It is an ideal set-up, allowing for the time, patience, and training requisite to develop world-class marathoners.

Across the archipelago, some 55 men's teams and 30 women's teams operate with systems similar to that of Tenmaya. Unlike the near-universal sponsorship dependence in America on Nike, ASICS, and the other shoe companies, the Japanese jitsugyodan (corporate team) sponsorship spans the economic spectrum, comprising automakers (Honda, Toyota, Suzuki), insurance companies (Daiichi Life, Mitsui Sumitomo), cosmetics makers (Shiseido, Kanebo), department stores, banks, and even a lingerie maker (Wacoal). Keith and Kevin Hanson's deal with Saturn is giving us our first glimpse of the possibilities in the U.S., and--just as it has been a boost to professional cycling teams here--it very much seems a model for the future of American distance running.

The Fans: Marathoners as Icons

Chat with your taxi driver or sushi chef on a night out in most Japanese cities and it becomes apparent that Yuko Arimori, Naoko Takahashi, and Mizuki Noguchi are national icons even among the sedentary. Likewise, the employees of the corporate sponsors of distance teams are as fervent as fans of the Beautiful Game. The stands at a national ekiden relay championship are a rainbow of corporate colors and logos, as employees garbed in their company hues give raucous support to their runners.

Not only do people run in Japan--156,000 Japanese runners applied on-line this summer for the second edition of the revamped Tokyo Marathon, while Runners, the country's largest running magazine, and field equipment maker Nishi Sports separately manage some 500 races annually in a country the size of Montana--they love to watch the sport at the elite level. There is no disconnect as there is in America, whereby those who participate in running events show little interest in also watching it done at a high level. The Japanese situation is more akin to golf in U.S., where Joe Duffer will go out on a spring morning and shoot 93 on his local course, then come back home in the afternoon and watch five hours of Augusta coverage.

In Japan, live broadcasts of marathons and ekiden events, which carry all the expert analysis and technical quality given the NFL here at home, garner staggering numbers. While U.S. marathon broadcasts rarely creep above 1 percent ratings, in Japan a 10 percent rating for a major ekiden or marathon would be a disappointment; certain athletes and events can bring Super Bowl-like 40-plus percent ratings.

As is readily apparent from international road race and marathon results, though, Japan's focus is intensely internal. Aside from the string of women's victories in Berlin, their world-class athletes are a virtual non-entity on the global circuit. The only international titles and podiums that matter to the corporate sponsors are the Olympics and world championships. Even the global brands such as Shiseido, Honda, Toyota, or Konica Minolta seem to take only passing interest in the accomplishments of their athletes outside of Japan. Kanebo's head coach, Kunimitsu Itoh says only half-jokingly, "Maybe 80 percent of the teams here in Japan are only thinking about the ekiden."

The Coaching Bloodline: Decade Upon Decade

At the 2006 Beppu-Oita Marathon, 30 coaches and a handful of foreign managers were scattered around the floor of a large well-heated tatami room in Oita Stadium watching the live broadcast of the seaside race. For a marathon junkie, the room was a session with the legends: Toshihiko Seko, Shigeru and Takeshi Soh, Kunimitsu Itoh, Koichi Morishita.

A glimpse through 55 years of Beppu results brings up other names prominent in Japan's current marathon success. Tenmaya's Taketomi lost the closest race in Beppu's history, runner-up by 0.3 seconds in 1979, then came back in 1980 to take apart the field by over three and a half-minutes. Two-time winner Yasunori Hamada went on to coach Sachiko Yamashita to her 1991 world championships silver medal. Tadaaki Ueoka, the 1969 winner, is now the head coach of Mari Ozaki and theNoritz team. As their own illustrious careers wound down, each remained involved in active, hands-on coaching positions around Japan. It is a knowledge and experience base that can't be bought. And more than the corporate funding, it probably spells out the reason for Japanese marathon strength.

Although various reasons were tossed around for the international slump of U.S. distance runners from the mid-1980's through 2000 or so, one that was rarely stated was that we had simply lost our knowledge base. Joe Vigil was out delivering the goods at Adams State, but Bill Dellinger, Bill Squires, and others had stepped back, and folks like Bob Sevene were rarely funded as needed. Few top athletes from the era, whether Joan Benoit-Samuelson, Bill Rodgers, Frank Shorter, Greg Meyers, or CraigVirgin, pursued coaching on the elite level. And who could blame them? Outside of the college system, professional coaching gigs have been almost nonexistent. As the era's top athletes retired, their experience went with them. It was a huge loss of knowledge at the post-collegiate level, a loss only now being reversed by the growing expertise of Keith and Kevin Hanson, Terrence Mahon, Brad Hudson, and of course Alberto Salazar.

Mark Plaatjes, the 1993 world marathon champion, commented on this last summer in a Running Stats interview, saying the problem has been compounded by younger athletes' reluctance to tap even the resources that are out there. "Do you think any of the younger guys that live in Boulder have ever come up to me and said, 'Do you have any advice for me, on what to do in the marathon?'...No." Fellow Boulder resident Steve Jones, the former marathon world-record holder, concurred. Referring to otherBoulder luminaries such as Arturo Barrios, Colleen DeReuck, and Lorraine Moller, Plaatjes continued, " These guys have been there, have done that. They've learned so much. They've made mistakes. And maybe you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you talk to these guys." [Since those comments, the Boulder Distance Project and Tempo Sports are two new Colorado clubs who have begun tapping Jones' experience, with Plaatjes also advising the latter group.]

Attribute it to Confucian ethics or attribute it to plain common sense, but the younger Japanese would agree with Plaatjes. Ask enough questions in Japan and you realize there are less than six degrees of separation linking dozens of successful marathoners. Take Yoshio Koide, who coached Yuko Arimori to Olympic silver and bronze, Hiromi Suzuki to world championship gold, and Naoko Takahashi to both the Sydney gold and the first sub-2:20 in women's history. Koide traces his coaching heritage to Japanese federation vice-president Hiroaki Chosa, who taught him at Juntendo University. Going down to the next generation, while a high school coach, Koide taught Hideo Suzuki , who has gone on to coach Reiko Tosa and 2:19'er Yoko Shibui.

An even deeper bloodline runs through the current Kanebo Cosmetics team. 1958 Fukuoka champ and Rome Olympian Nobuyoshi Sadanaga went on to coach Kunimitsu Itoh to great success on the Kanebo team. In turn, Itoh has followed up by leading Toshinari Takaoka to the 2:06:16 Asian Record. As Takaoka now winds down his competitive career and begins as a Kanebo coach, he will continue a string of knowledge that has been five decades in development. Such links are the norm throughout the country (see sidebar for background of three coaches).

The Training: Tempering the Steel

Given the 90 or so teams scattered across Japan, it is difficult to peg down a Japanese "Way of the Marathon," but there are certain components common to the country's success:

Distance, Distance, and More Distance. With a steady eye toward the marathon, the core training of most Japanese is distance. Yuko Arimori says, "For us, distance and time are both important. I would do up to 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) per month in my main training, whether at sea level or at altitude. I always liked to feel I was doing training that nobody else could do." Arimori recalls a session of six laps of the 5-and-a-quarter mile loop around the Boulder Reservoir while preparing forBarcelona. Looking through her 1996 summer training log, Arimori herself is amazed. "It wasn't just that 31-mile run. The day before I did two 20-kilometer time trials, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The morning of the reservoir workout, I had also done an hour run. Then the following day I did 3 x 10,000m as a speed session."

Such ultra-mileage sessions gradually erode the fear of the marathon's distance, You'll never hear an elite Japanese athlete talk about "hitting the wall," and few seem to even know what it is. Naoko Takahashi, as Arimori coming out of Coach Koide's camp, also loves her mileage. While preparing for the Sydney gold and the WR a year later, she would commonly follow-up 40K runs with 1-hour cool-down runs and 60K days were not out of the ordinary. Athens champ Noguchi also regularly hits 60K or more on her long run days, including her morning runs and occasional half-hour jogs at noon. Barcelona silver medalist Koichi Morishita relates how once a year all members of his former Asahi Chemical team would do a 70K run.

The drawback is that even athletes lacking the physiology of Takaoka or Morishita drift toward overly ambitious mileage. Takaoka's coach Itoh points out, "A lot of teams are just doing the training without thinking why. They might point at 1,000 kilometers in a month, and the coach will give the athlete a congratulatory 'Otsukaresama deshita' (Well done!) comment, as if the point of the training is just to train." Morishita agrees. "Rather than do the appropriate training and then see what the mileage turns out to be, many coaches are pointing at some mileage figure first."

It is also a big reason the middle-distance program in Japan is in such shambles. Promising 1500m athletes are soon prodded toward the 5,000 or 10,000, then on to the marathon. Japanese track history has so far produced just a single man under 13:15 and a single woman under 15:00. Contrast this with the marathon medals or an event such as the corporate half-marathon championship, which last March saw more than 90 Japanese men break 65:00. The coaches are gradually taking steps toaddress this lack of middle-distance expertise, such as a middle-distance seminar arranged by Nike with Hicham El Guerrouj in Tokyo this past winter or a plan to send 10 athletes and coaches for cross country training in Europe under the guidance of a foreign coach next January; nevertheless, long distance reigns.

Easy Days are Easy. It can't be stressed enough: While the Japanese system encourages extreme mileage, the athletes and coaches also know the value of easy days. Recovery days are no time for pride; 2:25 women and 28:00 men will shuffle along at 8:00 pace. There is a reason they are called "recovery" days. Bob Kennedy once offered the opinion that one reason Americans hadn't run better in his era was that they were running too hard on their easy days. Even within the team framework, there will be kakuji training, when the athletes can go off on their own and run where they want and as slowly as they want.

Loop Courses: Given the tight confines of Japan's geography, there is a great love of loop courses for long runs. Very few teams will set up a long run to be one big 20-mile course. Toshihiko Seko, who could have trained anywhere in the country, would often do long runs in the confines of Tokyo's Yoyogi Park or around the 1350m Meiji Jingu loop next to the national stadium. These loop courses serve several purposes. One, at least logistically, it is easier to set up water and special drinks. Two, by running the same loop continuously, the Japanese get their excellent sense of pacing, a key to marathon success. Third, with a loop, the coaches know exactly how an athlete is progressing. Changes in pace as the run proceeds can't be attributed to tail winds or topography along different stretches of the course.

Running Fast When Tired. As Tosa demonstrated in Osaka, the Japanese are mentally tough as nails in marathon crunch time, with an enormously high pain threshold. Coaches use a variety of tools to develop this toughness. Runs called build-ups are a basic unit of training. It is no more than a short warm-up followed by a steady increase in pace. Yoshio Koide will use such runs as many as three times per week, generally in morning training. For a 5,000m runner, the workouts might begin at 4:10 perkilometer, then gradually progress to 3:30 or so on a 12K run. For a marathoner such as Naoko Takahashi, the build-up will be done more in 5K blocks, with each 5K split becoming progressively faster. Koide also favors finishing up a long run with one or two 1,000m pieces. The long run done, the athletes will rest a bit, do a few striders, then set off on their piece. Koide protégé Arimori explains, "We are trying to replicate race conditions, to be able to run fast even when we are tired. When you already have fatigue in your legs, you have to change speed. We also had another workout where we would go on a 5-hour walk one day, then the next morning do something with speed, such as a build-up. These are the workouts that accustom us to running fast when tired"

And come next summer, when another pair of hot and humid championship races takes place in Beijing, running fast when tired will be what it's all about. The traditions and the system are striving to prep that next athlete to ascend the Olympic podium.